As she spoke, Lucius could feel his temper rising. “It would take nothing but a telegram,” he protested. “All he would have to do is dictate a letter to an aide.”
“And I told you, he can’t be bothered. Maybe in a couple of months, when I see him in Kraków.”
“Just a letter. A single sentence. Eight words, maybe ten. He dictates hundreds a day.”
“And I said not now. Why do you need to go there anyway?”
Lucius leaned back, fighting the urge to raise his voice. After everything, he thought, at least you owe me this.
She had grown silent, her way of saying she was done. But he didn’t move.
“Is there anything else?” she asked at last.
Lucius looked down at his hands, then back at her. “My mother says the general’s reputation is impeccable. Especially in a time of so much graft.”
Natasza eyed him cautiously. “And what does that mean?”
“Just that I was always surprised to hear your story about his buying champagne from the enemy, or how you and your sister were escorted by soldiers of the Third Brigade to Zakopane to go skiing during the war. Soldiers diverted from the front.”
She froze. The tiniest movement, almost imperceptible. But he saw, and she knew that he had seen.
She drew on her cigarette. “Blackmailing us won’t work, Lucius.”
“Oh, I have no interest in blackmailing you,” he said. “Not me.” He paused, realizing that for a brief moment, he was actually savoring the revenge. “But then, it’s the kind of story that my mother loves.”
Across the room, he noticed the image on the canvas for the first time, a self-portrait, a nude. He waited briefly for the pang, but there was none.
It took a week for the letter to arrive.
A single sentence, guaranteeing Lucius Krzelewski, friend of Poland, passage from Lwów to Dolina, and return.
The return was a nice touch, he thought. Generous of her. He hadn’t asked for that.
He went directly to the train station, buying a ticket departing the following morning for Lwów, through Oderberg, now called Bohumín, in the nation of Czechoslovakia, just eight months old.
That night he slipped into his father’s study. Both of his parents were out at a reception somewhere in the city, and Jadwiga had been given the week off to visit her family. A menagerie of lances, arquebuses, and bayonets covered one of the walls above a case of handguns. There, among the antique duck’s foot pistols, three-barrel volley guns, and Italian hand cannons was the old service revolver his father had tried to teach him to use when war broke out.
The case creaked as he opened it.
On the shelves built into the walnut paneling, he found an imperial atlas, thumbing through the pages until he found a map of the Carpathians. 1904. But the mountains hadn’t changed. He tore it out. From his father’s hunting kit he took a compass. He’d been lost once. This time he couldn’t take the chance.
Deep in his closet, he found the rucksack and old canteen he’d been reissued on the trains. He ran his fingers over the buckles; despite the months that had passed since he had worn it, he could still recall its weight, the way that snow collected in the seams, the creak when it was loaded. He slipped it over his shoulder. He had almost forgotten this other part of him, unbound from the house on Cranachgasse. This other person, who had spent two years with only what he could carry on his back.
From the kitchen: a round of heavy rye, a jar of pralines, and a piece of cheese. From his desk drawer: a stash of kronen, and then, uncertain if he could use Austrian currency in Czechoslovakia or Poland, his boyhood collection of silver coins.
Back in his room, he pored over the map, tracing the knuckles of the hills. Lemnowice was unmarked, but he found Bystrytsya and, following the valley up, the bend in the river where the village perched. From there the thin blue line wound through the green swath of forest. A willow, somewhere there. Two boulders by a riverbank.
With one of his old medical school pencils, he marked the village with a little x.
His parents returned late that night while he pretended to be sleeping. He slipped out early, before they woke. On the table in the dining room, where his mother had proposed he find a wife, he left a simple note. He was going to Galicia to see an acquaintance from his army days. Don’t worry about the ransom, he thought of adding, but the letter alone felt spectacularly defiant. She would know exactly what it meant.
On the Ringstrasse he hired a fiacre to take him to the North Station, where, within the crenellated arches, his train was waiting.
The sun was beginning to rise as they left the city.
He sat by the window, facing forward. In the compartment: a family of six, four wide-eyed children piled onto two seats, a soldier, a young man, dandied for the voyage, theatrically solicitous of his young, pregnant wife. Outside, a low light fell across the stockyards, where rail workers loaded up a car with rusted pipes. Farther along they passed a row of decommissioned trains, paint peeling now and windows empty, grass tufts growing from the narrow sills like old men’s eyebrows.
They slowed as they crossed the Danube on a rattling iron bridge.
They picked up speed. Across from him, the children ate sunflower seeds, neatly spitting out the wads of shells into a tin can they passed back and forth. The light was bright now, warming the window in an amber glow; he had to squint to watch the country pass. Boys played along the railway, miming aim at the passing carriages, then gesticulating dramatically as if they had just been shot. Passing Deutsch-Wagram, he recalled a visit long ago with his father and two older brothers, to see where Napoleon had gone to battle. A memory now, his brothers searching the fields for bones and bullets. Father scanning the horizon with binoculars, while a sunburnt Lucius held out the Orders of Battle like a little aide-de-camp.
Can you imagine? said his father. The bodies, the horses. This would have been bodies as far as the eye can see. But no, Lucius couldn’t imagine, then.
At the March River, the railway turned north, leaving the floodplain, and the land began to rise.
It was noon when they reached the border. At Břeclav, once Lundenburg, the train was boarded by Czechoslovakian police wearing old Habsburg uniforms, the imperial insignias torn from their epaulets. They had an air of make-believe, as if they were imperial officers playing officers of the free nation of Czechoslovakia. They stopped briefly in the compartment and collected passports, though neither the passengers nor the policemen seemed to know what for. Lucius thought briefly of his father’s revolver in his rucksack on the rack above him, the stories of militiamen, the shifting loyalties, now wondering what the police would think.
They didn’t check.
Beyond the city, the fields gave way to forests. The Morava appeared, dark blue and beaded with little hamlets. Barges moved in the distance. Across from him, the young man and his pregnant wife began to eat a pungent sandwich of egg and onion. The domesticity of the scene seemed almost impossible against the knowledge that within hours they would be entering territory once wracked by war, but with the warmth, he soon found himself beginning to doze off.
It was evening when they crossed the Oder, and night when they entered Bohumín.
In the Bohumín station, he was told the train to Lwów would be leaving in the early morning.
He left to look for lodging. It was hot, and the air was heavy with smoke from factories flanking the track. An oily film seemed to coat the buildings, the peddlers with their carts of pears and leeks, a pair of skinny horses who fought their bridles at the entrance to a dry goods shop. There were beggars everywhere; only seven months of independence, and already it had the air of a frontier town, the sense that things had been pushed there only to get stuck, like the detritus gathering at the corner of a wall.